Codesigned is a technology services firm focused on high quality, branded collaboration solutions, specializing in Microsoft SharePoint. With a team of experienced consultants, system engineers, SharePoint Architects, .NET developers and web developers, Codesigned provides enterprise- class collaboration consulting, large-scale implementation planning and installation, design and deployment of custom features and customized private cloud and mobile solutions.

SharePoint has proven to be Microsoft’s fastest revenue growth product in the company’s history. Codesigned’s research and development team has recognized this product growth as a tremendous opportunity within the marketplace and has successfully leveraged it with its cloud-based SharePoint offerings. With enterprise IT environments growing in size as well as complexity, IT executives are faced with the challenges of monitoring cost, maintaining security and mitigating risk, all while successfully addressing the needs of the business. While some hosting companies are alleviating some of these challenges by hosting SharePoint for companies, many lack the SharePoint expertise for development and administration of the collaboration solutions. Codesigned developed its unique cloud computing offerings to help create and provide comprehensive hosted SharePoint solutions, with manageable infrastructure, combined with their well-renowned SharePoint expertise and staff.cloud investments. Finally, the paper will solve common cost efficiency cloud problems with virtual datacenter recommendations and through Bluelock PortfolioTM decision support.

Specifically, Codesigned recently completed a project with WellStar Health System’s marketing department. The group was looking to build a new, dynamic company website on the SharePoint 2010 platform. Not being an IT department, they were not interested in managing the infrastructure and chose Codesigned because of the added value of hosting the application, as well as years of experience in SharePoint administration and development.

“While SharePoint deployments and the number of hosting providers have skyrocketed, the number of SharePoint specialists has remained nearly the same,” said Jake Weaver, CEO and Founder of Codesigned. “This partnership allows us to combine our extensive SharePoint expertise with Bluelock’s market-leading cloud services to take the burden of managing infrastructure off of our enterprise clients. Our success at WellStar proves that this relationship with Bluelock will continue to provide benefits to our clients.”

Bridging the Gap

The Codesigned team evaluated several large hosting companies that would enable greater scalability, agility and compliance for their needs. They evaluated managed hosting and cloud providers, including Terremark, SunGard and Dell, but found that most options did not provide the transparency and accessibility to their environment as well as a strong service mentality that could ensure a mutually beneficial partnership. Codesigned ultimately chose Bluelock, a VMware vCloud® Datacenter service provider, due to its unparalleled visibility into costs and resources through Bluelock PortfolioTM, true environment scalability and agility and Bluelock’s strong partnership with VMware.

“We wanted to find a partner that would provide quality of service beyond just the virtual hosting aspect,” said Weaver. “Bluelock’s Virtual Datacenter model provided us with flexible and agile IT infrastructure that we needed to deliver the service in a cost-effective and reliable manner. But what really made Bluelock stand out is their quality of support and managed services. We’re able to leverage their team’s extensive experience and expertise in the enterprise market. Bluelock consistently provides our team frontline support as we continue to optimize our SharePoint Private Cloud and serve enterprise customers such as WellStar.”

WellStar Health System serves a diverse patient population throughout Northwest Georgia’s metropolitan area by way of more than 12,000 team members at five hospitals and more than 100 physicians’ offices. WellStar’s marketing department needed a comprehensive SharePoint solution with dynamic content, custom webparts and manageable infrastructure to assist them in the launch of www.wellstar.org. However, with an aggressive go-live date for the website and its IT department inundated with projects for several more months, the marketing department turned to Codesigned for the project. Because Codesigned SharePoint Private Cloud runs in a Bluelock Virtual Datacenter, they were able to quickly design and host a multi-tier farm to meet WellStar’s needs.

“What also separated Bluelock was the company’s certification as a VMware vCloud Datacenter service provider,” said Nathan Clevenger, IT Infrastructure Manager, Codesigned. “While other providers can offer the virtual machines, we weren’t able to get our hands on the resources, which in turn doesn’t allow us to respond quickly to our clients’ needs. With Bluelock’s implementation of the VMware vCloud Director self-service interface, we are fully in control of the environment and can quickly deploy more resources when a client requests them.”

“I feel like with Codesigned, that I have a partner for life. They provide services like infrastructure, design services, crisis management, any updates I might need. I really don’t feel like need to go anywhere else. They provide a full spectrum of service, and on demand. It could not be better,” said Susan Deisenroth, Director of Online Marketing at WellStar Health System.

Bluelock Virtual Datacenters take minutes to set up, either through the vCloud Director-based self-service interface or with Bluelock’s managed services team. Users can build new virtual machines (VMs) quickly from public and private catalogs of VM templates, or simply upload VMs they already have running in an environment. With Bluelock Virtual Datacenters, users can easily subtract and add capacity as they go, paying for only what is used. With the ability to upload and download any VMware-compatible workloads, users can easily migrate VMDK files to and from the Bluelock Virtual Datacenter. The solution is built on open standards with Open Virtualization Format (OVF) packaging for the transport of workloads and interoperability, with additional support for the VMware vCloud API.

Business Value

Codesigned developed a multi-tiered environment using Bluelock Virtual Datacenters and spun up a full development, authoring, staging and production farm for its SharePoint Private Cloud. The company not only experienced the scalability and agility they sought, but also utilized additional benefits including Bluelock Portfolio, a decision support tool that provides performance and financial analysis reporting, enabling them to make better decisions about their infrastructure and wrench the most value out of their cloud investment.

“Bluelock enables us to dial up or down resources or even bring up a large server farm in a short period of time based on a client’s needs, and with Bluelock Portfolio’s resource and cost transparency we’re able to breakdown cost per client,” said Clevenger. “Bluelock Portfolio offers deeper visibility into the true cost of IT resources, enabling us to adjust our Virtual Datacenters to better align utilization with spending and help us educate our clients about what is happening in their environment and the impact of specific behaviors. Bluelock Portfolio simply provides unprecedented visibility and control that continues to deliver added value to our team and clients.”

“As SharePoint continues to grow and becomes more prevalent in regulated industries such as healthcare and manufacturing, security and compliance are that much more important,” said Clevenger. “However, we realized early on that it was in the best interest of our clients to partner with a cloud computing provider that is relentlessly focused on infrastructure and data security. With Bluelock’s SSAE Type II and SAS-70 type II audited datacenters, dedicated VLANs and countless stringent policies and procedures, we are more than confident offering our clients a reliable, redundant infrastructure that promises security and guaranteed uptime.”

Future Plans

Codesigned plans to continue to grow its existing environments demand for its SharePoint Private Cloud solutions continues to increase. “What’s exciting is that we’ve already put the model in place and scaling for our expected growth is just a matter of simply adding capacity through Bluelock’s VMware vCloud Director’s self-service interface or with Bluelock’s managed services team and resources are live within minutes,” said Weaver. “As both companies focus on serving the upper mid-market to large enterprises, we are confident Bluelock’s cloud will grow with us as our clients grow.”

About Codesigned

Codesigned provides meaningful collaboration strategy offered in the context of its customer’s needs and then applies appropriate business technologies and services that deliver measureable results. Codesigned solutions include private SharePoint clouds, consulting, portal migration and implementation, user experience and branding, collaborative websites, dashboards and analytics. Codesigned solutions are delivered on premise, via Codesigned Private Cloud Services and through mobile channels so the highest levels of collaboration can be achieved.